The Forbidden Universe: The Origins of Science and the Search for the Mind of God

by Lynn Picknett

  With the monarchy restored, Moray based himself in London, where he became one of the twelve that formed the nucleus of the Royal Society. At their second meeting in December 1660, he took the encouraging news that the King approved of their aims and was prepared to give the society his royal endorsement.

  However, all was not well within the ranks of the early Society. It is evident that there was a struggle behind the scenes between those who followed a more Hermetic/Rosicrucian model of a learned society and those who shared Bacon’s vision. The Hermetic version lost. This happened during the securing of the royal charter, which is normally portrayed as a simple intervention by Sir Robert Moray, enthusiast for the project and close friend of the King. But papers lost for three hundred years and rediscovered in the mid-twentieth century reveal a welter of plotting behind the scenes. Prime mover in this was Baron Skytte, a Swedish nobleman and confidant of King Karl Gustav, who was in London to promote the creation of a Protestant Alliance. Also interested in the new learning, Skytte attended the lectures at Gresham College.

  On 17 December 1660, Hartlib wrote to John Worthington that since his last letter of ten days before:

  I have recd some other papers, that have been confided tome, holding forth almost the same things as the other Antilia (for be not offended if I continue to use this mystical word) but, as I hope, to better purpose.22

  These papers, he goes on, were sent to him by Skytte, and comprise:

  … the propositions which were made to his Majesty by the Lord Skytte, and … a draught for the royal grant or patent wch is desired for the establishment of this foundation. Thus much is certain, that there is a meeting every week of the prime virtuosi, not only at Gresham College, in term time, but also out of it … They desired that his Maj leave that they might thus meet or assemble ymselves at all times, wch is certainly granted. Mr Boyle, Dr Wilkins, Sr Paul Neale, Viscount Brouncker are some of the members.23

  Skytte had evidently resurrected Hartlib’s plans. However, although Boyle supported them, they ultimately failed because of opposition from other founding members. Hartlib wrote to Worthington in April 1661, ‘There becomes nothing of Lord Skytte’s business, & I believe the other virtuosi will not have it that it should go forward.’24 After the royal charter was granted in July 1662, Skytte returned to Sweden, and Hartlib died the following year.

  In response to the Royal Society’s publication in 1667 of its early official history, by Thomas Sprat – later Charles II’s chaplain and the Bishop of Rochester – Worthington railed that the society was ‘materialistic and for nothing but what gratifies externall sense.’25 His outburst underlines criticism that the Society had failed to realize its full potential because it had rejected the more philosophical and metaphysical elements championed by Hartlib and Baron Skytte. The essential difference between the two visions of a learned society is that Hartlib’s had the reforming aspect that went back to Andreae and the Rosicrucian manifestos, and beyond that, to Campanella – and ultimately to Bruno.

  One wonders exactly why a society, no matter how well connected, would be in quite so much of a hurry to rush out its official history, just seven years after it was founded. Their haste may represent a desire for the victors to etch their triumph in the minds of its readers, but it also suggests the promotion of a version of events that was economical with the truth.

  Another sign of the Royal Society’s Hermetic eclipse was the sidelining of John Wilkins, the man who had started the club at Wadham College and a Rosicrucian-friendly founder. Although he was appointed as the Society’s secretary, he shared this role with a newcomer, the German-born theologian and diplomat Henry Oldenburg, and was soon marginalized.

  Was the struggle over the direction and control of the Royal Society simply about the scientific philosophy it should adopt? In fact there appears to have been more to it even than that. One result of the organization of the new Society was that Oldenburg, as its foreign secretary, inherited Hartlib’s network of correspondents, and he undoubtedly used his position for intelligence-gathering of a more politically sensitive kind.

  Robert Hooke, the Royal Society’s curator responsible for organizing experiments, complained that Oldenburg ‘made a trade of intelligence’.26 In fact, he used his network for gathering not just scientific but also political information, the latter on behalf of the Secretary of State, Lord Arlington, even arranging for all the Society’s correspondence from abroad to be delivered to the office of Arlington’s under-secretary. Oldenburg was imprisoned in the Tower of London for two months as a suspected spy during the Anglo-Dutch war of 1667, only being released when peace was made.27

  As Sir Robert Moray was also a spy, this raises the question of whether one reason the Royal Society was created was as a cover for intelligence-gathering. After all, it still remains unclear why Charles II was quite so interested in the Royal Society. What was in it for him? Although this suggestion might seem absurd, bear in mind that in its early days the Society was not the celebrated and distinguished institution it is today. It was only when Isaac Newton became its president in 1703 (his presidency lasted for twenty-four years) that it could bask in his immense prestige. John Gribbin writes that by the end of Newton’s tenure the society has completed ‘the process whereby a gentleman’s club became a pillar of the establishment’.28

  If the reforming side of the Hermetic tradition had been extinguished by the time the Royal Society came into being, its influence over the scientific revolution had not waned. And it reached its final, and greatest, flowering in the person of ‘the most outstanding scientific intellect of all time’,29 Isaac Newton.

  THE GREATEST SCIENTIFIC GENIUS

  Isaac Newton (1642–1727) is widely regarded as the greatest scientific genius in history, and his masterwork, Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (Philosophiae naturalis principia mathemetica) – usually known, reverentially, simply as the Principia – is deemed the single most influential book ever written. His elucidation of the laws of motion and of gravity effectively created the modern world: mechanics and most forms of transport, including space travel, would be impossible without them. Newton even created the mathematical system, infinitesimal calculus, needed for his work – in itself no small achievement. After all, this and most other books would never see the light of day if writers had first to invent laptops – or, more appositely, writing itself. But Newton had the vision to know what he needed to be great, then went ahead and made it all happen with the unswerving, if often anti-social dedication of genius.

  Despite being from a humble background, Newton managed to rise to fame and fortune. He was the only child of a Lincolnshire farmer who had died by the time he was born on the farm at Woolsthorpe near Grantham, in the first year of the Civil War, on Christmas day 1642. He was a sickly child, and for his whole life he would be a solitary soul. From the age of three Newton was brought up by his grandmother, his mother having married the rector of a nearby parish. He hated her and his stepfather for abandoning him and went so far as to threaten to set fire to their house with both of them in it, but the rector’s relative wealth would in the end prove useful to him.

  From the beginning, Newton was fascinated by mechanics and delighted in making machines such as a mini mouse-powered windmill. He was entranced by how things worked. A life-changing moment came at the county fair when he bought a prism from an itinerant salesman, which stimulated his obsession with the phenomena of optics. Naturally, he was expected to be a farmer like his father, but when he was twelve an understanding uncle – a Cambridge graduate – realized that was not his destiny and secured him a place in a school at Grantham, where he also had to work as a servant to wealthier students.

  John Gribbin describes one of Newton’s early practical jokes:

  He … caused one of the earliest recorded UFO scares by flying a kite at night with a paper lantern attached to it, thereby causing ‘not a little discourse on market days, among the country people, when over their mugs of a
le’.30

  Newton was also not afraid of experimenting on himself. On one occasion he stuck a bodkin behind his eye to test its effect on his eyesight. On another he stared at the sun until he almost went blind – mercifully the effects were only temporary. Some might think he carried being a genius to a ludicrous degree.

  Newton won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1661, where he seemed merely an average student. Little from his time at Cambridge suggested the historic genius he would become. In 1665, just after he graduated, the college closed because of the plague that was sweeping the country, and he returned to Woolsthorpe for two years. What was a disaster for so many actually ended up being the making of Newton. It was at Woolsthorpe that he experimented with the prism, unravelling the secrets of light. It was also there that he devised the calculus, which he termed ‘fluxions’.

  And momentously, it was also at Woolsthorpe that he first began to think about the problem of gravity. The story of the falling apple stimulating his thinking of about gravity was Newton’s own. The apple tree is still there – the original was cut down long ago but a new one grew from the stump. He realized that whatever caused apples to fall also kept the Moon in its place and determined and governed the motions of the other planets, and therefore the Earth. It would take him twenty years and a radical shift in his thinking to refine and build on his original intuition.

  Once the plague was over, Newton returned to Cambridge as a Fellow, and became professor of mathematics in 1669, at the age of twenty-seven. Immediately this caused a problem. At that time newly elected Fellows had to be ordained priests (Anglican, of course) although Newton argued – ultimately to Charles II, who had to approve the appointment – that he should be exempt from this rule.

  Although Newton was deeply spiritual, he kept his beliefs so private that even today no one is certain what they were. But the very fact he was so circumspect – and had challenged the ordination rule – suggests that his beliefs were at odds with the dogma of the Church of England. Newton certainly seems to have been a Christian but of a heretical kind, although there is no consensus about its exact nature. Ironically for a Fellow of Trinity College, he definitely doubted the doctrine of the Trinity, as he wrote a book about it that he wisely decided not to publish. He seems to have doubted that God and Christ were ‘of one substance’, and may even have regarded Jesus as non-divine. He refused the sacrament on his deathbed.

  Newton first attracted the attention of his peers through his pioneering work on optics and light, for example inventing the first practical reflecting telescope, using a mirror instead of a lens. As a result, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1671. It was at the end of the decade that he returned in earnest to his research into gravity, prompted by a dispute with Robert Hooke.

  Newton poured all his thoughts and the results of his experimental work into his monumental achievement, the Principia, begun in 1684 and published three years later. The full title of the Principia was itself revolutionary, since it declared that natural philosophy was explicable and expressible in mathematical form. Astronomers such as Copernicus and Kepler had used mathematics and geometry, and Galileo had taken their application a step further, but to Newton mathematics was at the very heart of science.

  One consequence of the Principia was the final proof of Copernicus’ theory. Newton demonstrated that his theory of universal gravity accounted for Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, which was in turn derived from Copernicus’ heliocentric model. This was the great watershed in the history of cosmology: after the Principia was published, it was impossible to doubt the heliocentric theory. To Bruno, of course, this would have represented only a partial success. Global acceptance of heliocentricity was due to usher in a golden age of universal Hermeticism, after all. But things had changed since Bruno’s day …

  The Principia was an immediate sensation, although rather like Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, it was ‘one of the least-read bestsellers of the age’.31 After it was published Newton moved to London, where he became a celebrity, albeit a rather reclusive and curmudgeonly one. He was knighted in 1705 by Queen Anne – the first ‘scientist’ to be honoured in this way. Both she and her successor George I would heap great honours on him. Newton became Warden of the Mint in 1696, then Master of the Bank of England, and was elected President of the Royal Society in 1703, a position he retained until his death. He was a Member of Parliament for two short periods. When he died in 1727 it was a cause for national mourning. In honour of the occasion of his state funeral in Westminster Abbey, the poet Alexander Pope penned the famous lines:

  Nature, and Nature’s Laws lay hid in night:

  God said ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light.

  However, Newton was anything but the sort of materialist-rationalist so prevalent today among the ranks of scientists, who believe all spirituality is a form of superstition. It is now well known that Newton’s major preoccupation was not gravity or the laws of motion or optics, but alchemy. The first biography that mentioned this was in 1855 but even after that it was a subject that was glossed over fleetingly and apologetically. More recently, however, historians of science have begun to acknowledge that Newton’s esoteric interests did not only play a vital part in his thought processes, but also actively assisted him in making his great discoveries.

  Richard S. Westfall, Professor of the History of Science at Indiana University and author of a major biography of Isaac Newton, wrote in 1972:

  One lively and active facet of the lively and active enterprise that is Newtonian scholarship today is the continuing revelation of the presence in Newton’s mind of modes of thought long deemed antithetical to the modern scientific mind.32

  One of the first to realize the importance of Newton’s esoteric side was John Maynard Keynes, the leading twentieth-century economist and great collector of Newton’s alchemical writings, who in a paper read to the Royal Society in 1946 commented that ‘Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians …’33 He went on (his emphasis):

  Why do I call him a magician? Because he looked on the whole universe and all that is in it as a riddle, as a secret which could be read by applying pure thought to certain evidence, certain mystic clues which God had laid about the world to allow a sort of philosopher’s treasure hunt to the esoteric brotherhood.34

  On Newton’s death, 169 books on alchemy were found in his personal library – making up one-third of his collection. In fact, it transpires from all his writings that his main esoteric preoccupation was the quest for the philosopher’s stone, and he was particularly fascinated by the work of the French alchemist Nicolas Flamel (c. 1330–1418).

  Most of Newton’s alchemical papers – of which he produced a vast number, over a million words – collected by Keynes and others, are now in Jerusalem, in the Jewish National Library. As befits the work of a genius with a need to be secretive, they are written in elaborate codes, and many of them have yet to be deciphered.

  Alchemy was against the law, and could even attract the death penalty (although in a curious excess of official spite, alchemists were to be hanged on gilded scaffolds adorned with tinsel, so at least their demise was pretty in a trashy sort of way). Legal disapproval existed not for reasons of religious intolerance, or because alchemy was considered fraudulent, but because of the fear that alchemists might succeed in making gold, and thereby undermine the economy. So it is an exquisite irony that the Establishment saw nothing wrong in putting Newton – an alchemist to his gilded fingertips – in charge of the Bank of England and of the Royal Mint, even entrusting him with the re-minting of the entire currency in the 1690s.

  Like many esotericists before and after him, Newton was a great believer that the earliest civilizations, such as Egypt, knew more than people in his own day – that they possessed the prisca sapientia, or ‘ancient wisdom’. He was in no doubt that the Greeks had learned everything they knew from the Egyptians. He also believed that the Bi
ble was one of the sources of the ancient wisdom, and that it contained prophecies relevant to his own time, particularly in the Book of Revelation. Besides studying many other ancient temples and buildings, he was fascinated by the Temple of Solomon, and devoted considerable energy to the study of its design, dimensions and proportions, which he believed incorporated ancient truths.

  Like many thinking people of the post-Renaissance world, Newton was also particularly interested in Rosicrucianism, possessing copies of the English translation of the manifestos and Michael Maier’s works, which he annotated heavily. In his copy of the English translation – now held in Yale University Library – he wrote a lengthy note on the purported history of the Fraternity of the Rose Cross. Referencing Maier in particular, the note ends, ‘This was the history of that imposture.’35 This quote is often cited as evidence that Newton rejected Rosicrucianism. However, it actually refers only to the Christian Rosenkreutz legend in the Fama, which Newton recognized as an allegory or ludibrium.

  The source of Newton’s obsession with the esoteric is particularly illuminating. He undoubtedly started out as a mechanist, pure and simple, reserving a special admiration for Descartes. However, in the mid-1670s he changed radically, embracing a far more arcane worldview. The reason for this can be traced back to the influence of the Cambridge Platonists, especially that of Henry More, who – nearly thirty years Newton’s senior – was an old boy of the same school in Grantham. As we saw earlier, this woefully misnamed group were fundamentally Hermeticists, part of an unbroken line of a spiritual brotherhood stretching back to Marsilio Ficino, who rediscovered the works of Hermes Trismegistus. At least one member of the Cambridge Platonists, John Worthington, was also part of Hartlib’s Invisible College, itself a direct continuation of the Rosicrucian Antilia, which was intimately connected to Bruno’s reforming campaign and the Giordanisti.